US President Donald Trump.
What you need to know:
Mutuma Mathiu: Trump exhumed the manure of racism
President Donald J. Trump is not an outlier. He is not an aberration, curiosity, mutation or unusual. He is a wealthy, well educated, mainstream American for whom 74 million of his compatriots voted five weeks ago.
This is not to say that the whole lot of those 74 million good people — there are a lot of fine people, on both sides — subscribe to the entire gamut of his opinions and beliefs. No. But they think that he represents their values better than President-elect Joseph R. Biden.
As you know, the election is completely out of contention: Mr Biden won it by a long mile with 306 electoral college votes to President Trump’s 232 and the President has no path left to overturn that victory. All states have certified the results of the election by the so-called safe harbor deadline, December 8, the date by which they are expected to have resolved any disputes and forwarded their vote tallies to the National Archivist for whatever peculiarly American reason.
But Mr President still rejects the results, alleging widespread fraud that he can’t prove. He or his allies have filed about 50 lawsuits, the bulk of which has been thrown out of the courts by disgusted judges, including at least two that I know that were dismissed “with prejudice” meaning that the cases were so weak, you can’t present them to court again.
Distaste for immigrants
But it is not just the President who is refusing to accept the results of the election. Out of 249 Republican members of the Senate and House of Representatives, only 25 acknowledge that Mr Biden won the election, according to a Washington Post survey. Some might privately accept the result of the election but are scared out of their wits of the President to say so. There could also be others who agree with him and believe he was robbed of victory.
Republican leaders are leading from the front in supporting President Trump’s rejection of his loss and his determination to overturn the election results. This week they blocked a motion seeking to recognise Mr Biden as the candidate whose swearing in Congress is preparing for on January 20, 2021.
CNN reported: “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rules Committee Chairman Roy Blunt of Missouri voted with House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy in blocking the motion, effectively preventing the inaugural committee from publicly accepting that the upcoming inauguration will be for Biden. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, voted with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Hoyer voting in favour.”
And beneath the leadership is the real reason why leaders will not stand up to Mr Trump: the so-called Republican base, that is, a good chunk of that 74 million people who believe in Mr Trump and his claims that the election was stolen. The Republican base will probably politically eviscerate any leader who goes against Mr Trump. This base shares Mr Trump’s nativist America First politics, a deep seated objection to immigration, opposition to abortion and other liberal values. Many tend to be Christians with a strong affinity to largely rural values of gun ownership, individualism and distrust of government.
Other than his distaste for immigrants and foreigners, I am not sure that Mr Trump shares any of those values, but he represents them very well. He may not be duck but he quacks well.
So what does all this mean? Well, for one, there is a problem with US elections, however much we have been impressed and admire election officials who have resisted pressure to interfere with election results. In my opinion, parties that are distrustful of election results are the ones most likely to have been involved in rigging them. It is a little like a relationship: the most distrusting and suspicious partners are the ones most likely to be cheating.
Republicans are notorious for rigging elections by suppressing the vote. They do this by making it difficult for minorities to vote either by reducing polling stations in minority areas or requiring the kind of documents which would bring one in contact with the kind of authorities that people of colour prefer to avoid.
Political instability
Secondly, as you may have heard on US TV stations many times, Mr Trump is salting the land for Mr Biden; in other words, he is destroying Mr Biden’s government even before it is formed. He is doing it by undermining the legitimacy of the Biden win and sowing discontent and hatred for the incoming administration.
Also, there is speculation that Mr Trump will not attend Mr Biden’s inauguration. Instead, he may hold a rival function during which he will announce that he intends to run for President in 2024 and use the occasion to launch something akin to the opposition’s campaign of afternoon demos in 2017, destabilising the dynamic and making it impossible for the new administration to settle and get any work done.
Mr Trump’s plan is to call the shots from outside the White House. And who’s to stop him?
Thirdly, Mr Trump is not a passing cloud. He has changed America indelibly, turning its political values and democratic practices on their head and introducing political instability in a country which has enjoyed smooth transfer of power for many decades.
He has also exhumed the manure of racism whose evidence we see in the almost daily shooting of black men by the police but which is largely hidden in the urbane discourse of national politics. He has set in motion something that is likely to change America and the world, possibly forever.
mmutuma@ke.nationmedia.com
No comments :
Post a Comment